Speakers

Dr Annie Bartlett St George’s London University

Dr. Fiachra Byrne is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin. His current research project is on the mental health of juvenile prisoners in England and Ireland from 1850 to 2000. This comparative study examines the penal practices, legal frameworks, and professional and public discourses relating to the management of juvenile prisoners’ mental health. He completed his Ad Astra funded PhD at the School of History and Archives, UCD in 2011 with a thesis on psychiatry and mental illness in Ireland during the twentieth century. It examined compelling patient narratives of mental illness, investigating how notions of the self, autonomy and mental pathology were constructed through processes of medical, patient and familial exchange.

Dr Catherine Cox is one of the PIs on the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland at University College Dublin. Her publications include Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland, 1820-1900 (2012); with Hilary Marland, Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (2013); with Maria Luddy, Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History 1750-1970 (2010) and numerous articles. With Dr Graham Brownlow, she is editor of Irish Economic and Social History.

Dr Nicholas Duvall obtained his BA in History from the University of York, and an MSc and PhD in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine from the University of Manchester, with a thesis on forensic medicine in Scotland, 1914-39. Nicholas is currently a Research Fellow on the prison project, a joint position held at Warwick and University College Dublin. Alongside researching mental health with Cox and Marland, he has developed a strand of research exploring the relationship of prison medical officers with the medical profession more broadly during the 1970s and 1980s.

Dr Kimmett Edgar is Head of Research at the Prison Reform Trust, having previously been Senior Research Officer at the Oxford Centre for Criminological Research. His major work, Prison Violence: The Dynamics of Conflict, Fear and Power, explored the roots of prison violence in conflicts among prisoners. At the Prison Reform Trust, his work on mental health includes Troubled Inside: The Mental Health Needs of Men in Prison,Too Little, Too Late: An Independent Review of unmet Mental Health Needs in Prison, and “Recognising mental health – balancing risk and care” (2010). He is a member of the Northern Ireland Ministerial Forum on Safer Custody and Quaker Representative to the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.

Professor Harry Kennedy, BSc, MD, FRCPI, FRCPsych., is Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist and Executive Clinical Director, National Forensic Mental Health Service, Central Mental Hospital, Dundrum, Dublin and Clinical Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin. He was formerly Clinical Director, North London Forensic Service and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Royal Free Hospital. He trained in UCD, Hammersmith Hospital and Maudsley/Institute of Psychiatry. He established early prison in-reach services in Pentonville and Holloway prisons, Cloverhill and Mountjoy. His research includes work on the epidemiology of suicide, homicide and violence; anger and mental illness; prison psychiatric morbidity, mental capacity; structured professional judgment and benchmarking admission and discharge criteria in forensic mental health services; international human rights law and mental disabilities. He has given expert evidence in human rights cases including Whitemoor escapers (special secure units), McA (pregnancy in prisoner), Napier (slopping out), Z & G v Revenue (same sex marriage).

Professor Marland is one of the PIs on the prison project and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. With Cox, she is researching the strand of work on mental health in prison 1850-2000. Her research and publications have focused on the history of psychiatry, including Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (2004) and the relationship between migration and mental illness, a joint project with Catherine Cox, resulting in Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (2013). Her most recent book Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920 was published in 2013. Aside from prison medicine, she is currently working on medicine in the modern household.

Dr Éamonn O’Moore graduated in medicine from University College Dublin in 1991. He was appointed National Lead for Health & Justice in the newly formed Public Health England (PHE) and Director of the UK Collaborating Centre for the WHO Health in Prisons Programme (European Region) in April 2013. He had worked previously as Director of Thames Valley Health Protection Unit (2008-13) with the Health Protection Agency and as a public health consultant with Offender Health in the Department of Health (2005-13). He also is a Specialty Doctor in Sexual Health with the Royal Berkshire Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, since 2004. He is an international expert on prison health, has written national and international guidelines on managing health issues in prisons, contributed to research in this area, and supported the development of national surveillance systems for infectious diseases in prisons and other detention settings in England.